


Melt Like This

by foreverwriting9



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-23
Updated: 2015-02-23
Packaged: 2018-03-14 19:31:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3422930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foreverwriting9/pseuds/foreverwriting9
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What he wants most in the universe is an explanation for the way she makes his chest suddenly feel too small for his lungs, his hearts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Melt Like This

**Author's Note:**

> Be warned: here be character death. But also, inexplicably, a dragon. Because my roommate said, “I like depressing things. Just like add a dragon or something.”
> 
> I took a little liberty with the dragon.

 

**_And in the end, we are nothing more than love and space dust._ **

**David Jones**

 

 

**VIII.**

He likes the weight of her hand in his. (This is one thing he’s absolutely sure of.)

Together, they duck under the low-hanging branch of an evergreen, pausing to suck down gasps of breath. 

"I seriously cannot take you anywhere," Clara says raggedly, brushing hair out of her eyes.

They're running. It might be his fault, it might be her fault, or it might be - in fact, it definitely is - both of their faults. In the near distance they can hear the angry murmurings of an alien mob coming closer and closer.

The Doctor flashes Clara a crooked grin, cheeks pink and hearts still pounding much too hard. He reaches for her hand again. "Can hardly take you places either. I distinctly heard them say, 'That short one with the eyes, we want her head.'" He inhales deeply one last time and then starts edging out from under the tree. “Ready?”

“Ready.”

If she notices that he squeezes her fingers reassuringly before dragging her along after him, she doesn't say anything.

(This is the other thing he’s absolutely sure of: running, with her, feels right. It sends a resounding click through his chest like he’s finally found the right puzzle piece or solved a particularly challenging riddle. The Doctor and Clara. The-Doctor-and-Clara. They just fit together.)

The angry mob noises have definitely gotten louder. A gunshot goes off, the bullet whistling through the leaves overhead.

Clara startles so badly that she misses a step and almost crashes headlong into a bush. “Now they’re shooting at us?” she asks, incredulous. “What did we even do?”

The Doctor just shrugs. “It’s a big universe, Clara,” he explains, sidestepping a particularly large puddle of mud. “We can’t possibly be agreeable to _everyone_.”

“You have a hard enough time just being agreeable to _some_ people.”

“Haha.”

She laughs at his deadpanned response and he doesn’t even need to glance over at her to know that her nose is adorably scrunched and her dimple showing. But he should focus on something else. Like running, probably.

Another gunshot, this time much, much too close.

“Don’t fall into that bush, Clara,” he warns teasingly, gesturing at some underbrush. When he doesn’t get the clever retort he’s expecting he looks over at her - but she’s not running with him anymore. The Doctor skids to a stop and whirls around. “Clara?” Something explodes just over his shoulder, making him jump.

“Doctor?” She’s on the ground, blood spilling out between her fingers and onto the cover of pretty autumn leaves beneath her. And she’s swearing.

He’s struck by the urge to silence her, to say _Language!_ in some mock offended tone, but the word sticks in his throat. This is bad, bad, _bad_.

“Doctor.” There’s more panic now and less swearing. Her pupils are blown way, way wide and there’s a ragged, gaping hole in her blouse that she’s trying desperately to cover. (He _loved_ that blouse and he never, ever told her.)

“It’ll be okay,” he assures her, sinking to the ground and ignoring the way the cold earth presses into his knees. There’s a whole life that’s never been lived spilling out of her veins and he doesn't know what to do. He can see all the stars she'll never touch spinning just beyond her fingertips, can hear ancient, alien languages rattling inside her lungs. He only ever wanted to save her. “It’ll be okay.”

She doesn’t look like she believes him.

“Listen,” he says, because he is a Time Lord and he is wise and he will fix this, “the TARDIS can’t possibly be much further. We make it there, we patch you up, and then we go visit a planet with some slightly less hostile natives. A library? You love a good library.” He’s rambling now. “I could take you to the library on the fourth moon of the Castillarian solar system or we could visit the Library of Alexandria even though I know you’ll want to interfere and stop it from being destroyed despite the fact that I’ve explained to you six times that it’s a fixed point - ”

Her fingers bump into his chin. She’s staring at him like she knows everything he’s not saying. “And how are you going to get me to the TARDIS?”

“I’ll carry you.”

She laughs, but it might be a sob. “Are you fully prepared for all the touching that might involve?”

“Yes.” As though proving it to her, his hands skim along her shoulders and then down her arms, stopping to curl carefully around her wrists. Touching her now is something sacred, something precious; he thinks maybe he should have spent his whole life feeling her heartbeat race beneath her skin. “Clara,” he murmurs. It’s all he can manage.

When she looks up at him, her eyes are bright and clear and she is the most beautiful thing he has ever seen, will ever see. “I’m not afraid." It sounds like a promise, somehow. 

He says, as though it makes all the difference in the world, “Don’t worry, we’ll go some place quieter next time.”

 

**I.**

He doesn't know how to cook. Or rather, he knows _how_ , but he seems to have lost the ability to _execute_ anything even remotely culinary.

That's certainly a new development, not to mention an incredibly frustrating one.

He has all these recipes floating around in his head: cassoulet, Yorkshire pudding, split pea soup. He knows the precise movements that go into shucking an oyster or julienning carrots. He can remember paling around with Julia Child and James Beard for God's sake, but. He. Can't. Cook. Somewhere between the mental picturing of a recipe and the actual carrying out his hands go all funny and ingredients end up places they're not supposed to. Like his jacket or the kitchen ceiling.

That’s what he’s doing when she walks in: staring up at a bit of egg yolk that seems to be deciding whether or not it likes sticking to the ceiling or if it would look much better splattered through his hair.

“What the _hell_ have you done to my kitchen?”

He startles, throwing the cup of flour that’s pinched between his fingers up into the air. "You shouldn't sneak up on people, Clara," he says sourly, frowning at her through the cloud of flour that’s now hanging suspended in the air between them.

"Seriously? You seriously - " She splutters, "You broke into _my_ kitchen!"

He shrugs in response, but doesn’t bother actually answering her because his hands are suddenly very busy tossing paprika all over her counter.

With an annoyed huff, Clara grabs both his wrists and pins them down. Some stray paprika sprinkles across the sleeve of her shirt. “Doctor, why are you making a mess in my kitchen?"

His gaze dips down away from hers. Under the gentle pressure of her fingers his hands fidget, almost like a spasm. “I thought this was what people did,” he says eventually, when he can meet her eyes again.

“Sorry?”

“You know,” he tries to gesture, but since she still has a hold on him it’s mostly just his elbows and shoulders moving up and down a lot, “coming ‘round for dinner.”

She’s all eyes now. “ _Oh_.”

The egg on the ceiling chooses that exact moment to drip onto his face.

When Clara finally manages to stop laughing at how ridiculous he looks with egg yolk in his eyebrows, she drags him over to the kitchen table and pushes him down into a chair. “No more cooking,” she says, pointing sternly at him. “You’re banned from cooking.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Ignoring his goading tone, she grabs the nearest dish towel and begins rubbing it vigorously across his face. He makes an outraged noise into the fabric, but she ignores that too. “Next time you want to have dinner with me let’s lose the breaking and entering element, yeah?”

He can hear the smile in her voice. Her brisk cleaning of his face gradually slows, becoming more gentle and careful.

“I guess that can be arranged,” he mumbles petulantly, the words mostly muffled by towel.

She makes one last sweep across his face, paying particular attention to his eyebrows, and then she asks, "What were you making?"

His brow furrows in thought. After a moment he says, "A soufflé, probably." 

Clara flicks his nose. "Shut up." But she's laughing.

 

**II.**

The sky above them is on fire, and in this moment, she is everything that is human: eyes wide and fingers digging into his arm as she murmurs excitedly, "Look. Look at the stars."

He chuckles. "I can see them, Clara."

“They’re beautiful,” she breathes, like she hasn't heard him at all, and he can see the stars burning themselves up in her eyes, can feel her quiet reverence slipping in among the small spaces between his ribs and nestling there. His throat aches.

"Did you know," he starts, but she shushes him.

"No. No in-depth histories or extended anecdotes or pithy remarks. Let's just..." Clara sighs, letting her attention drift back toward the stars and the deep black space that stretches out before them. "Let's just enjoy this."

 

**III.**

_Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky._

Clara’s busy teaching. The Doctor is bored. (Not that she’s a boring teacher - far from it, in fact. It’s just that if he wanted to teach a group of very small pudding brains about T.S. Eliot he would simply herd them into the TARDIS and take them back to 1930s London so they could ask the man himself, but Clara’s strictly forbidden him from doing any such thing.)

To keep himself occupied he translates the poem into Gallifreyan and scratches the swirling symbols into the wood of the desk he’s currently sitting at. Clara keeps shooting him dirty looks that he pretends not to notice.

A little girl with a long blonde braid eventually turns around and whispers, “That’s school property.” She’s frowning, but she also looks kind of fascinated, like she wants to reach over and touch the long-forgotten alien language he’s using to deface a desk.

The Doctor squints at her. Unfortunately, the only retort he can come up with is something along the lines of _Property schmoperty_ , so he just stays quiet and keeps doing what he’s doing.

By the time he looks up again, the entire class is gone and it’s just him and Clara.

Her arms are crossed. He supposes that’s not good.

“Next time,” she says, voice unnervingly level, “I’ll ask you to sit out in the hallway.”

The Doctor manages to look contrite for maybe half a second. Then, “But Clara, I wanted to go on an adventure with you when I showed up, not an hour after the fact.” Maybe she’s forgotten that he is a Very Important Time Lord - the Oncoming Storm, no less - and that Very Important Time Lords should not have to sit in a classroom full of small, sticky humans just waiting for the appropriate time to take their companions on amazing trips to see the stars. He sighs. “There’s really no point going to watch the diamond moon of Kerbekh eclipse the sun now.”

She throws her hands up in the air, voice hitting a surprisingly high pitch. “You have a time machine!”

Instead of conceding her point, he stands up from the desk, stretching slowly, and then moving toward the front of the room. “So you’re teaching them Eliot,” he says conversationally, because he recognizes a losing argument when he sees one and he does, after all, have a time machine.

She frowns; she knows what he's doing.

When he reaches the chalkboard, he shoots her an unfathomable look and then lets his fingers trace the opening lines she has written there. "First Austen and now Eliot. You're very ambitious." He doesn’t say it like it’s a bad thing.

Clara shrugs. “I want to teach them things that I enjoy, things that made me love English class. And I like Eliot. He can be very…” she trails off, as though testing the word in her mouth before saying it out loud. “Bittersweet.”

There’s chalk all over his hands now. He brushes it off on his trousers and tries to come up with something useful to say. Somehow it comes out, “He was rubbish at night gremlin hunting.”

“What?”

“Eliot. You wouldn’t believe what a noisy walker he was. He’d scare off the nasty things before we could get close enough.”

“Why were you…?”

The Doctor waves a hand vaguely. “1915 Hampstead. Seemed like the thing to do.”

“Right,” she says, nodding. “Of course.” There’s a beat of silence and then, when it becomes clear that that’s pretty much all there is to the story, she finds the sleeve of his jacket and tugs, reminding him. “Don’t we have a diamond moon to see?”

The effect is immediate. He lights up, eyes crinkled, teeth showing. “ _Finally_ ,” he grumbles, tone completely belied by the look on his face. 

When he reaches for her hand it feels like the most natural thing in the world.

 

**IV.**

He drops her off a mere three hours after they left.

“You’re getting better at this,” Clara says with a smile, patting his arm when she passes by to retrieve her coat from the railing.

He shrugs off the almost compliment and then gestures to the screen above his head with its map of planets spread out in digital silver. “Pick a planet,” he replies, “any planet. For next time.”

She finishes slipping her arms into the sleeves of her coat and moves to stand beside him, pushing herself up onto her toes to reach the screen. “That one.” She taps a nail against her choice.

Oh,” the Doctor says solemnly, frowning at the screen as though it has somehow personally offended him, “I can’t go there. There was a horrible misunderstanding involving a ferret, the King’s valet, and a rather large amount of jam.”

"It’s always something with you, isn’t it?"

"Sometimes it just happens, Clara, I can't help it."

They both grin at each other ridiculously for a moment before she shrugs and says, "Well, just surprise me then.” She makes a move toward the TARDIS doors but stops and turns back around before she gets very far. “I’ll see you later?”

(There are many ways to say _I love you_ , and this is the way Clara chooses to do it.) 

“See you later.”

 

**V.**

"What are you doing?"

He tries very hard not to crush the delicate paper between his hands at the sound of her voice. "Nothing," he says, but it comes out of his mouth weird, like a barely contained lie.

"I can tell when you're lying now."

"No you can't."

"Yes I can."

The Doctor spins around in his seat to glare at her. Unfortunately, the look doesn't have nearly the effect he expects it too and really, when did he become so bad at scaring her off?

Clara's peering at him from around a bookshelf, eyebrows raised expectantly; she's not going anywhere. "You can tell me anything, you know," she murmurs.

"Of course. Of course." His fingers fidget around his creation one last time before folding the final corner and holding it out for her to see. "It’s a swan,” he explains, in case she looks at the origami creature and just sees a crumpled wad of paper.

Before he can so much as blink, she’s standing right in front of him, fingertips trailing over the swan’s thin neck and carefully crafted body. “Is this what you do now?” she asks, genuinely curious. “Is this one of your hobbies?”

He doesn’t know. It’s weird to not know things like that still, so he shrugs. “I don’t know, maybe.”

She seems to accept that answer. “Can you make another one?”

Without saying anything else, he sets the swan off to the side and reaches for another sheet of paper. In a matter of seconds he’s folding edges and bringing corners together with a practiced ease he didn’t even know he had. About a minute later, he has another paper creature resting in his palm. A dragon, this time, with fragile wings and a mouth open in mid-roar.

The Doctor holds it out to Clara like some kind of offering.

When she takes it from him, she smiles, an awed and gentle thing and not the least bit sad. It’s the smile she reserves for particularly precocious alien children or him when he does something exceptionally, well, human. (He knows because he’s started cataloguing her varying smiles. For science, obviously.)

What he wants most in the universe is an explanation for the way she makes his chest suddenly feel too small for his lungs, his hearts.

“Thank you,” she says, and all he can do is nod. The paper dragon stares back at him from between the cage of Clara’s fingers. 

Later, after much debate and playful bickering, she names it - without any kind of further explanation - Cecil.

 

**VI.**

He has a bad day.

Clara seems to be the only remedy.

So he breaks into her flat. Again. Which is maybe not the best idea because she made him promise that he would never, ever do it again and that he would instead wait for her to come back _before_ making himself comfortable in her home _like a normal person_. Maybe if he’d done that she wouldn’t be swearing at him so breathlessly.

" _Shit_ , what the - " She presses the rest of the sentence into her palm, covering her mouth in what seems to be an attempt to save him from hearing her endless stream of profanity.

"Sorry," he says, but he's not really sorry at all. "Sorry."

He must have said something wrong, because when she pulls her hand away from her mouth there’s no more swearing and there’s no lecture over his breaking and entering habits. Instead, there’s just a soft, questioning “Doctor?”

Absurdly, his throat closes up. He tries to work around it. “Clara,” he says in response, wincing when her name comes out sounding strained and a touch away from almost needy. He doesn’t want to do this - this confiding thing. He doesn’t _need_ to do it.

Apparently Clara disagrees. "Doctor."

Sometimes he doesn't like her pushiness, her ever-present desire to know _everything_. Sometimes he wishes she would just leave him alone - "There was this planet." The words spill out onto the floor between them. For some reason he doesn't want to take them back.

"Okay." There's a silent _and?_ tacked on to the sentence.

"And I could have saved them." His gaze shifts away from hers, picking out the patterns in the wallpaper over her shoulder. Anything to not have to look at her as he says it. "And I, um, I didn't," he admits in a last rush of breath, waving one hand with an exaggerated dismissiveness. Maybe if she's focusing more on the way his fingers cut through the air she won't notice his face and the way it suddenly seems to be malfunctioning.

He's wrong. So very, very wrong.

(She _sees_ him.)

Clara presses her lips together into a thin line, looking thoughtful. Eventually she says, "Let's go some place quiet."

He gestures behind him to where the TARDIS sits snugly trapped between the wall and her coffee table. "Where and when?"

The corner of her mouth lifts as she shakes her head. "No time and space," she replies. "Just right here. Right now."

What does that mean? The Doctor frowns. “What?”

Clara holds out a hand. “C’mon,” is all she says, and he does.

Ten minutes later, they're in a small park down the street from her flat, sprawled out on a bench together, gazes trained on the blue sky overhead.

"Isn't this better?" 

He smiles up at a cloud shaped like the two-headed queen of Telfodyre IV. "Yes," he agrees, "much better."

 

**VII.**

“So imagine,” he says, arms stretched out, fingers splayed wide. He’s setting the scene. “Imagine a world made entirely of evergreen trees - ”

Clara scrunches her nose at him. "Wouldn't that get, I don't know, cloying?"

The interruption makes him sigh. “Well, at first, yeah. But then sensory adaptation kicks in and you hardly even notice it. It’s like…” He snaps his fingers a couple of times, trying to come up with a good example. “It’s like your home. To you, it doesn’t smell like anything really, because your sense of smell has become used to the environment. But to anyone else it smells like laundry and books and sometimes burnt cooking.” He’s so swept up in what he’s doing - mouth and hands moving a mile a minute - that he misses the unamused frown she throws him.

“Is that really what my flat smells like?”

“What?” he asks distractedly, reaching for the screen dangling above the console so that he can check their coordinates. Then her question catches up to him. “Oh, yeah, ‘course it is.”

For some reason she’s still frowning. “I smell like burnt cooking?” she queries, pinching the sleeve of her blouse between two fingers and holding it up to her nose.

The Doctor sighs exasperatedly again, turning away from the console to look at her fully. “Only sometimes, Clara. I’ve already said that.”

At best, she looks only slightly appeased by his correction, but he decides to ignore her sudden bout of self-consciousness in favor of adventure.

He begins moving toward the TARDIS doors. “Anyway, planet of the evergreen trees, are you ready?”

Her immediate, blinding smile seems to be contagious. "Let's _go_ ," she says, so he throws the doors open wide.


End file.
